Web Development

Linux Administration

Wordpress Developer

Plugin Development · Theme Development · Customization · Hosting

About Me

Over twenty years working in the IT world has given me an extensive knowledge of the industry and exposure to a large number of products, platforms, protocols and industries. From starting out in 1987 as a PL/1 programmer on IBM mainframes moving in to PC/LAN administration gaining essential hardware, software and networking skills as Netware progressed through the years and integrating with Windows NT, then being invited to take on UNIX administration whilst employed by a software house in 1995. Using SCO Unix and HP-UX, I was sent to various locations worldwide including the USA, Asia, Africa and Europe on behalf of a software house to install and troubleshoot complex containerization software systems.

From there I moved onto team management, being responsible for a team of 4 running a large HP-UX system for major shipping line. After a few years, the decision was made to offer my services independently working as a self-employed contractor, I have worked as a UNIX/Linux System Administrator, Web Developer, a Networking/PC/Windows/NT engineer and 2nd/3rd level support desk engineer for ISP’s, major electronics and IT companies and Financial houses.

For the past 7 years I have been living in Den Haag, the Netherlands with my wife and two young kids. At home I have an active interest in IT and computers, maintaining a home network comprising of a diverse range of operating systems and hardware platforms. I enjoy using computers on a daily basis for both personal and commercial multimedia and web based projects.

My most recent project was for a major international organisation in Rijswijk (Netherlands). My primary role was the development of a secure data exchange platform replacing traditional high volume mail based paper and CD exchange. read more…

One of the problems with living in a foreign country and not speaking the local language very well is that it can be a pain to deal with bills, tax documentation, government correspondence and other post that comes through your door. My solution is an automated document management system that will translate anything that is scanned on our network scanner. read more…

After setting up the Linux based Music Player Daemon on my Raspberry Pi as my new front-room HiFi server, I looked around at the great number of clients available. I couldn’t find one that exactly suited my needs, so I wrote my own. read more…

A requirement was made to provide secure access to a collection of approximately 500 videos, roughly an hour each in length. The system should be web based, use the credentials of an existing client portal and be conservative on disk/bandwidth usage. Administrators should also be able to group videos and add/remove them. read more…

Back in 2008 I developed my own Content Management System (CMS) for Lemonberry as we had a need to provide our clients with websites where they could have a rich interface for keeping the content up-to-date, whilst keeping the stucture and design of the site to us. read more…

Bradley worked on everything from writing input/output programs to troubleshooting wire-wrap boards. Five months into the project, he created ctrl+alt+del. The task was just another item to tick off his to-do list. “It was five minutes, 10 minutes of activity, and then I moved on to the next of the 100 things that needed to get done,” he says. Bradley chose the keys by location—with the del key across the keyboard from the other two, it seemed unlikely that all three would be accidentally pressed at the same time. Bradley never intended to make the shortcut available to customers, nor did he expect it to enter the pop lexicon. It was meant for him and his fellow coders, for whom every second counted.

Possibly the best thing about WordPress is how simple it makes most tasks. Just log in to the administration, click here and there and boom, you have three new plugins installed, a new theme activated etc. People love this, and we do too.

There’s a flip side to it, however. Once the site is deployed and used by real visitors, those buttons actually become sort of a threat to the site because they make all the changes irreversibly and straight in the production. That is a problem because 3rd party plugins sometimes have bugs, are incompatible with each other, the theme might need updates etc. There are ways to deal with it but it’s a tricky job – so tricky that over 70% of WP sites in Alexa Top 1 Million gave up on updates.

A programme that convinced humans that it was a 13-year-old boy has become the first computer ever to pass the Turing Test. The test — which requires that computers are indistinguishable from humans — is considered a landmark in the development of artificial intelligence, but academics have warned that the technology could be used for cybercrime.

Apparently a milestone in computing has been reached according to the Royal Society in London. The Independent reports that a Ukrainian team has built a bot that has convinced 33% of the jury that it was human… read more…

Contrast, as the name implies, is about finding totally different, but still complementary typefaces that are each fit for their intended application. Traditionally, this involves pairing a serif with a sans serif. Typefaces will generally conflict if they are too similar: two ever-so-slightly different serifs or sans serifs rarely play nicely together.

As a designer, the important thing is to establish a clear hierarchy. This could be as simple as varying size and weight of the same typeface, but where the typeface varies, that’s where careful pairing is crucial. If you have a display face packed with unique personality, you’ll need something more neutral to do the hard work.

An very interesting article from The Next Web talking about visual content in web design.

A picture is worth a thousand words, and when it comes to capturing your audience’s attention, you want to take full advantage of every chance to communicate your message. Short attention spans have made lengthy explanations less effective?

This was an interesting read from the Linux Voice site – how the city of Munich in Germany migrated 15,000 PC’s from Windows to Linux, and saved money in the process. Even Steve Bullmer got involved pleading to make them stay with Microsoft!

Steve Ballmer tried to convince our mayor that it would be a bad decision to switch to open source, because it’s not something an administration can rely on. But some members of the city council said: what are we, if one member of a big company simply comes here, and he thinks he can just switch our opinions?